Gender Politics, suppressed speech and ‘only obeying orders’.
by Gavin Ashenden:
Helen Watts has never met Angelos Sofocleos. Neither of them could have guessed what would bring their lives together. She is a Girl Guide leader in Ealing, West London, and he is a post graduate student of philosophy at Durham University.
This weekend their lives collided. They were both run over by the gender dysphoria bandwagon. Each was expelled from their voluntary positions for thought crime. The newspapers are reporting their fate.
To be honest, Angelos was asking for it. He would have known what he was dealing with. That doesn’t justify his being silenced and ostracised, but he was a postgraduate. He knew what the rules were. Perhaps he thought Durham might just be at the tail end of the university censorship stakes. Well, it wasn’t. Helen however, was an innocent.
Angelos was editor of two university magazines. One was the university’s philosophy journal ‘Critique’ and the other the more cheerily named ‘Bubble’. Clearly a man who liked to be involved in his community, true to his beliefs and values, he was also president of the free speech society for Humanist students. Well, he isn’t any more. He has been sacked from them all. He was silly enough to think that just because there was a Free Speech Society, there would be free speech. There isn’t; there wasn’t.
He got involved in an on-line argument about what gender was and what defined a woman; to make matters worse he flagrantly tweeted, “Is it a crime to say ‘women’ don’t have penises?”
Well, the answer seems to be it depends on what you mean by a crime. But asking what he mistakenly thought was a rhetorical question, which despite the regret of a few progressive police forces is not yet actually a crime, has nonetheless certainly got him sacked and ostracised.
“My position at the magazine, I was told, required me to be impartial. Being impartial really means however, having no views at all when it comes to gender…….What I said though was a biological fact. We have reached a weird era where we are sacking people for stating facts.”
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